. . . a private booking

a lapdance, I believe,

is a pretty straightforward thing.

sure, you may be thinking,

a lapdance is the sort of thing

that I could describe without much trouble

or better yet quickly identify,

if I were to see one in progress.

maybe you could even

demonstrate-- or perform 
a lapdance

given the right circumstances.

maybe you even have

in the past. 
maybe multiple times. 

it’s really none of my business.

I can’t say whether any dance

I’ve performed in the past--

and I’ve performed a great many--

could really qualify as

a lapdance and then again,

it’s really none of your business.

but it may be the case for you,

as it was for me,

that when a prospective employer referred to one

in the context of

a job description

for twenty dollars every three and a half minutes

you, wine glass in hand,

wouldn’t know exactly

what a lapdance might entail.

faced with the prospect of earning
one thousand dollars per night,
you may have asked questions, like I did

about hand placement, musical genre, payment,

wardrobe, expectations gleaned from semantics,

gender roles and female objectification

and a litany of other things.

regardless of the answers,

you may have found yourself back again

the following evening,

as I did,

in the red lit dive bar near Times Square

greasy kitchen moonlighting as dressing room

sixty-seven girls, sixty-seven fat purses,

lipstick tubes, hairspray cloud, garter belts, false eyelashes,

sixty-seven tiny dresses,

ass cheeks, wads of twenty dollar bills, perfume,

shaved legs, lace and bows,

tall tall strappy heels, up the stairs,

rihanna beats, devil horns, drinks you have to earn,

crowded bar, sixty-seven girls,

at midnight there’s pizza, which isn’t half bad, 

and the tiny dresses come off.
lingerie, thongs, curled hair, conversations,
music pulsing from above,
an enchanting erotic environment beckons.

personally, I was more interested

in the assorted crowd of

seemingly decent, down-to-earth men

wearing button-down shirts

crowded around clutching beers

waiting to be approached.

Ed the math teacher who wrote a children’s book
too scary for children,

Duncan the handsome scruffy South African

who said that this

was the most real experience

he’d ever had with a woman

(at a place like this).

I could have stayed downstairs

until 4am as scheduled

bemoaning the differences between

what the clients

and the hosts

were told about the event,

telling everyone my name was Natasha,

declining politely when anyone asked me

to dance,

discussing my relationship status,
my greatest aspirations,

and why I moved to new york.

but, when I wandered up the stairs

warm with gin and tonic

to wait in line for the bathroom

in my five inch heels

and the longest dress in the building

grazing my thighs,

I felt a little voyeuristic

peering through the black sheers

to the dance zone.
at long last: the main event.
low red couches. dim light. men sitting back,
hands on knees. looking. soaking up.
tiny dresses and lingerie too gone missing.

and suddenly there was no longer any confusion

in my mind whatsoever

as to the definition of

a lapdance.